Originally Posted by
Krekko
I came here to say essentially this.
In the end, they are struggling with classes having 3 specs as it already is. I hardly see how adding 10 more would make it any better, that's like adding 3 1/3 more classes. Not only would this detract from possibly adding more classes, but if they do add more classes then that's just more to add to the to-do-list.
4th Spec would cause more problems than it would solve.
As great of the idea of Shockadins are, or tanking Warlocks and Tanking Shamans, and Melee Mages and Melee Hunters, the ideas are just novelties which should remain just that. That is until we find that Blizzard is able to offer proper class balance and design to all existing classes/specs, I think they should focus on the existing rather than creating something else.
Take Elemental Shamans they need a TON of work done, you think that adding a Tanking Shaman Spec would help them any? No.
In the case of Feral/Guardian druids it made sense and it benefited both specs, if you look at the whole class though, did not benefit Boomkin druids though, they are still in an awkward place as ever.
It's moves like this which Blizzard needs to make, moves which make sense, which will yield direct results to problems without adding more. They were already essentially doing that with Feral/Guardian but by them keeping it in the same tree it just made it 10x harder. Adding a 4th spec for the sake of a 4th spec will harm more than it solves, if it does solve anything other than pipe dreams.
The mentality though that "you get to just switch specs" does not so simply work, if it's not Ranged-Ranged there might be no room for you, same thing with opposite. Other times it does, and it's nice! You can go from ranged-Melee but at the end of the day not everybody want's to do that and would rather play the spec of their choice instead of being forced out of it because of it being busted/unbalanced. Adding that many more specs to balance and work on will just make that many more broken specs and that many more people unhappily being bottlenecked into a spec they don't want to be because their main one isn't broken and won't get fixed anytime soon because it's at the bottom of an even longer list now.
Some things in the game need to be preserved, can't just do things for the sake of doing them, that's not how you produce quality products.